Tips and tools for white-hat Ethical Hackers

The first picture materialize in mind after hearing the word ‘hacker’ is a bad character who steals the information from the computers of other people and use it in his execrable deeds, but that’s just dark side of story. The hackers are of two sorts – black-hat or malicious hackers, who exactly fit upon the aforesaid lines and white-hat, a security professional who strives to make internet a safer place for. The White-hat hacker exploits his skills to enhance the security by divulging vulnerabilities before unethical can detect and utilize them.

The security professionals break into a system or network to discover voids, and then fill those with policies, patches and other security measures. The penetrating assess teams include the individuals with an all-embracing combination of diverse skills, from hardware and software engineers to social engineers and network experts.

Making a white-hat hacker

Becoming a certified security analyst is not a piece of cake. It requires a certain level of professional paranoia, for getting which one would need to trade a soul with devil. If not identical, the methods used by those malicious and ethical hackers, are almost same but the mentalities and aspirations are starkly different.

The ways of thinking of a security analyst and other people are diverse as well because the former observes everything on security perspective. Let’s take the example of a USB Charging port, for you it may just a way to get your phone charged, but for a security analyst it is a conundrum and he will be counting port’s connections and astonishing that using just a USB connection, how much data could one steal from a phone. The penetration tests exploit that approach.

The ethical hackers, working for the security companies attempt to exploit their sculpture to discover ways into a business network. If you owning a big organization that has a data that is needed to be secured you will most probably need certification from a prestigious consultant before securing any insurance. And that certification will need at least one primary penetration test.

Penetration testing

A thing you should remember about penetration test is that having success in it isn’t a pushover. At lot of tools and tactics that the security team uses to perform a test might have been used a long ago by the black-hat hackers. The malicious hackers are equipped with advanced tools, with the help of which they make inroads into systems and networks. In a network, a penetration test can address many problems but not all. An assessed network could be more secured, but certainly not fully protected from every threat.